(National Book Award winner) Pulitzer Prize winner Timothy Egan presents this cautionary epic about a horrific, man-made environmental disaster that coincided with the Great Depression, and will soon vanish from living memory. Despite advice to the contrary from those who knew the prairie, land policies and speculators encouraged family farmers to till millions of acres of Midwest grassland in the 1910s and 20s. But by the 1930s, a series of droughts and the seasonal prairie winds blasted the ruined soil into "black blizzards" some 10,000 feet high. Whole communities were mummified in the Great Dust Bowl. In telling the larger story Egan also offers harrowing portraits of families like that of Hazel Lucas—who watched her baby die from the dust that clogged her lungs—and posits that history could easily repeat itself.

"Dramatic, exciting, and accurate ... this is can't-put-it-down history"—Walter Cronkite